Last night, after leaving my study group that is exploring wider concepts I realized that I’ve been sitting with a question that feels both ancient and urgently modern:
What if the mess of the world isn’t evidence of failure — but of growth?
Not growth in the shallow, self-help sense. But the kind of growth that comes only through experience, contrast, and choice.
Many participatory spiritual traditions — including the Urantia Book, karmic philosophies, and Eastern paths of enlightenment — suggest that wisdom doesn’t come from being told the truth. It comes from living into it. Discovering it. Sometimes painfully.
Which raises a difficult but necessary thought:
Is challenge — even suffering — part of how consciousness matures?
Let’s look at the concept of learning ‘both sides’, without excusing harm…does this change our hearts if we see differently?
From a karmic perspective, experience isn’t linear. It’s integrative.
Imagine this:
In one lifetime, a person steals. Not out of malice, but fear, scarcity, or immaturity. They live with the aftermath — guilt, justification, erosion of self-trust. They learn what it does inside a person to take what isn’t theirs.
In another life, timeline, or experience, that same soul is stolen from. Now they know the other side — violation, vulnerability, the rupture of safety.
Neither experience is “good.”
And for many, the pain is not theoretical. It is present-tense.
People are losing safety, health, dignity, loved ones, homes, and hope — right now.
No spiritual framework gets to rush past that reality.
Fear still constricts the body. Loss still fractures the heart. Trauma still lingers long after the moment has passed.
Any lens that speaks of growth must first kneel before grief.
Yet, together, the experiences create understanding.
Not intellectual understanding — embodied understanding.
This doesn’t mean harm is necessary or justified. It means meaning can be extracted from what should never have happened, and that extraction is what turns pain into wisdom.
When seen this way, “bad people” begin to look less like villains and more like souls mid-lesson, acting from unintegrated awareness. That doesn’t remove accountability — but it does soften condemnation.
Softening condemnation does not mean abandoning justice. Accountability, repair, and the protection of the vulnerable remain non-negotiable. But when we widen the lens, rules begin to look less like instruments of control and more like teachers of consequence. The Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins, for example, aren’t arbitrary prohibitions — they are maps, warning us where certain paths lead long before we’re ready to face the cost ourselves.
When viewed through an experiential lens, these aren’t arbitrary rules. They’re warning signs:
“This path fragments you.”
“This desire, unchecked, hollows you out.”
“This action ripples outward in ways you won’t like living inside.”
You don’t need to commit every transgression to understand them — but many humans do encounter their effects, either as actors, recipients, or witnesses.
And that encounter is often what gives birth to compassion.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Many enlightenment traditions — Buddhism, Vedanta, even Urantia — don’t treat suffering as sacred, but they do treat it as instructive. Suffering exposes attachment. Attachment reveals illusion. Illusion dissolves into awareness.
Detachment, then, isn’t apathy. It’s freedom from being defined by the wound.
This is where ideas of salvation, enlightenment, and awakening begin to converge — even across traditions that use wildly different language.
Some call it:
- Spiritual evolution
- The second coming of Christ-consciousness
- Karmic maturation
- Collective awakening
Different concepts for similar movements.
Even more interesting (I find) is the sevenfold pattern that we find…well, everywhere!
It’s hard to miss the repetition:
- The Seven Adjunct Mind Spirits in Urantia
- The Seven Chakras in the Vedas (c. 1500–500 BCE)
- The Seven Veils from multiple traditions including Christianity
- The Seven Powers, Seven Stages, Seven Days, Seven Seals…
Across cultures and cosmologies, growth seems to move in layers, not leaps. From instinct → emotion → intellect → morality → wisdom → spirit → unity.
If that’s true, then what we’re seeing in the world — polarization, exposure of corruption, the surfacing of long-buried pain — may not be regression.
It may be a transition.
The uncomfortable middle where lower consciousness can no longer sustain itself, but higher consciousness hasn’t fully embodied yet.
Let’s explore this then, as a reframe for the moment we are in right now.
What if the ugliness is a catalyst?
What if humanity is being nudged — sometimes shoved — into greater awareness, greater responsibility, greater compassion?
Not because suffering is good.
But because avoidance no longer works.
And what if the call now isn’t to escape the world, but to meet it with eyes open — integrating experience into wisdom, pain into purpose, division into discernment?
Maybe enlightenment doesn’t arrive as peace first.
Maybe it arrives as truth.
And maybe this moment — however we name it — is not the end of something holy, but the beginning of something far more conscious.
If this moment is a transition rather than a collapse, then the work before us is not passive waiting — it is participation.
The call is not to explain suffering away, but to stay present within it.
To listen without fixing.
To hold boundaries without hardening.
To refuse cruelty — even when it would feel justified.
To choose courage, clarity, and compassion in the smallest places we actually inhabit.
Awakening doesn’t happen all at once.
It happens when someone interrupts a cycle.
When someone tells the truth without dehumanizing.
When someone chooses repair over retaliation.
When someone allows pain to make them more conscious — not more closed.
Perhaps the most radical response to this moment is not fear or certainty, but presence.
Presence with ourselves.
Presence with each other.
Presence with the work of becoming more human, together.
If the world is waking up, then each of us is being asked the same quiet question:
What will I bring forward from this moment — numbness, or wisdom?
Leave a comment